That was only one aspect of the ruse; another was playing out on the other side of the Jordan River. For some time, a mixed force of several thousand Allied fighters—Arab tribesmen, soldiers of the Arab Northern Army, British and French advisors together with specialized artillery and armored car units—had been making their way across the Syrian desert to gather at the old citadel of Azraq. If detected by the Turks—and it was hard to see how such a large force could go unnoticed indefinitely—it would serve to further confirm that the Allied attack was coming at Amman, just fifty miles to the west of Azraq. Instead, the Azraq unit’s true target lay seventy miles to the northwest, the crucial railway junction of Deraa. Moreover, this unit was to act as the pivotal first shock troop for the entire offensive, their goal to shut down both the Hejaz Railway and its spur line into Palestine on the eve of Allenby’s attack in order to paralyze the Turkish army from behind. By September 12, the last of these shock troops had arrived in Azraq, and were met there by the two British lieutenant colonels in charge of coordinating the operation: Pierce Joyce and T. E. Lawrence.
By that date, Lawrence had already been in Azraq for nearly a week, and had taken stock of the diverse fighting force as it drifted in: warriors from a dozen Arab tribes; the British and French transport and artillery specialists; a detachment of Indian army cavalry; even a small unit of Gurkhas, the famed Nepalese soldiers with their trademark curved khukuri daggers. On that same morning of September 12, the final component fell into place with the arrival in Azraq of the senior Arab rebel leadership: Faisal Hussein foremost among them, but also Nuri Shalaan and Auda Abu Tayi and a host of other tribal chiefs whom Lawrence had helped bring to the cause of Arab independence over the past two years. With the vanguard of the attack force set to begin deploying the following morning, the plan was for these leaders to gather at a conclave that afternoon, during which Lawrence and Joyce would go over their various objectives.
Yet it was at precisely this juncture, on the eve of the campaign he had worked so hard to bring about, that Lawrence was suddenly plunged into a paralyzing gloom. Shortly after Hussein and the other Arab leaders arrived, he slipped out of Azraq and made for a remote mountain cleft called Ain el Essad, some eight miles away. As he recounted in Seven Pillars, “[I] lay there all day in my old lair among the tamarisk, where the wind in the dusty green branches played with such sounds as it made in English trees. It told me I was tired to death of these Arabs.”
There had in fact been warning signs for some time that Lawrence might be headed for just such a collapse. Back in mid-July, only days after receiving confirmation of Allenby’s offensive launch date—an event that should have put him in an ebullient mood—Lawrence had written a melancholy letter to his friend and confidant Vyvyan Richards. “I have been so violently uprooted and plunged so deeply into a job too big for me, that everything feels unreal,” he told Richards. “I have dropped everything I ever did, and live only as a thief of opportunity, snatching chances of the moment when and where I see them.… It’s a kind of foreign stage on which one plays day and night, in fancy dress, in a strange language, with the price of failure on one’s head if the part is not well filled.”
He had gone on to describe his admiration of the Arabs, although he now recognized that he was fundamentally apart from them, an eternal stranger. He wrote of the words he carried in his mind—peace, silence, rest—“like a lighted window in the dark,” but then questioned what good a lighted window was anyway. As was often the case when Lawrence wrote from the heart, he closed by denigrating what he had written, calling it “an idiot letter” born of his contrarian nature. “[I] still remain always unsatisfied. I hate being in front and I hate being back, and I don’t like responsibility and I don’t obey orders. Altogether no good just now. A long quiet, like a purge, and then a contemplation and decision of future roads, that is what is to look forward to.”
But if his letter to Richards spoke to physical and spiritual exhaustion, it was compounded by the guilt he felt in having “profitably shammed” his Arab comrades for two years—and this guilt had recently grown worse. In early August, while planning for the Azraq operation, Lawrence had again met with Nuri Shalaan, the warlord of the powerful Rualla tribe he had first tried to woo to the Sherifian cause a year before by suggesting the chieftain believe the most recent promises Great Britain had made to the Arabs. At their August meeting, Shalaan had at last fully committed his tribe to the rebel side, although in the disclosures since their previous meeting—the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement—he surely knew his British suitor had been less than forthright. If exactly why remains elusive, it is clear both from Lawrence’s memoir and comments he made to his early biographers that the deception he had perpetrated on Shalaan weighed more heavily on his conscience than any other.
Then, right before setting out for Azraq, there had been an incident that caused Lawrence to question the very purpose of his “crusade” for the Arabs. In late August, just as the main Arab army was preparing to leave the Aqaba region for the north, King Hussein had elected to pick a bitter and rather public fight with Faisal, all but accusing him of disloyalty. For nearly a week, the angry cables had passed between father and son, during which the rebel advance ground to a halt, the entire Syrian offensive cast into doubt as the clock ticked away. Lawrence had finally patched together a rapprochement—intercepting one of Hussein’s cables, he had scissored off its angry second half, only passing along to Faisal the apologetic-sounding first half—but that all his plans had been nearly sabotaged by the man he was ostensibly fighting for left a bitterness that would never fully go away.
But it seems something else was also working on Lawrence that day in Ain el Essad, a very recent and devastating personal blow. By all evidence, it was during his stay in Azraq that he first learned of the death of Dahoum, his young companion at Carchemish, the apparent victim of a typhus epidemic that had swept northern Syria some time before. To a profound degree—and to a depth Lawrence himself may not have fully realized—he had come to personify the war in his own mind in the form of Dahoum; it was for that young Syrian boy and his future that the Arabs needed to be free. Now Dahoum was dead, and with him had gone so much of what had animated Lawrence to the fight. Although he would never reveal the identity of the mysterious “S.A.” to whom Seven Pillars is dedicated—Dahoum’s real name was Salim Ali—the first stanzas of the book’s prefatory poem strongly suggest both the timing of when Lawrence learned of Dahoum’s death and the effect it had upon him:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
And wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house,
That your eyes might be shining for me when we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
And saw you waiting
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy [death] outran me
And took you apart: into his quietness.
Despite his grief, Lawrence had given too much of himself, and asked too much of the Arabs, to pull away at the climax of their long campaign. He would write of his mood on September 12 that “today it came to me with finality that my patience as regards the false position I had been led into was finished. A week [more], two weeks, three, and I would insist upon relief. My nerve had broken, and I would be lucky if the ruin of it could be hidden so long.” With that, he rose from his “lair” at Ain el Essad and made his way back to the gathered warriors at Azraq, now just hours away from their first strikes against the enemy.
By coincidence, that same day, a top-secret report was being sent to the U.S. military intelligence office in London, outlining the collapse of morale among the Arab rebels fighting with the British. “It is reported that the Syrians who are with Emir Faisal in the Aqaba region,” the September 12 report stated, “are entirely disaffected and that there are many dissensions.” One reason, apparently, was the rebels’ woeful incompetence on
the battlefield. “In spite of the support of the British, the Arabs of Arabia have shown their incapacity to organize or make war.… The entire Arab situation appears to be in a great muddle.”
The report’s author was the military intelligence bureau’s chief correspondent in the Middle East, attaché William Yale. With that dispatch he was establishing a tradition of fundamentally misreading the situation in the Middle East that his successors in the American intelligence community would rigorously maintain for the next ninety-five years.
IT HAD A certain boys’-lark quality to it, a not uncommon experience in war when all the advantages and few of the risks reside with one’s own side. Leaving Azraq on the morning of September 14, Lawrence spent the better part of a week careening through the desert around Deraa in a Rolls-Royce armored car, blowing up bridges and tearing up railway tracks, dodging ineffective enemy air attacks, skirmishing with the occasional unlucky Turkish foot patrol.
The ease with which he was able to do so could be largely credited to the success of the ruse concocted at Allenby’s headquarters. With the Turks massed around Amman in anticipation of the presumed attack there, the Azraq strike force had nearly free rein to pursue its goals: the severing of the Hejaz Railway to the north and south of Deraa, as well as of the vital western spur leading into Palestine. The ultimate goal, of course, was to accomplish all this before Allenby’s offensive got under way on September 19.
As Lawrence discovered when he caught up to the main raiding party, however, a first attempt on the southern railway link had gone awry through simple bad luck. Now quite sold on the efficacy of mechanized war in the desert, he decided to make a personal go of it, setting out for the southern railroad with just two armored cars and two “tenders,” or large sedans. He found his target on the morning of September 16 in the form of a lightly defended bridge in the middle of nowhere, “a pleasant little work, eighty feet long and fifteen feet high.” A particular point of pride for Lawrence was the new technique he and his colleagues used in setting their explosives, one that left the bridge “scientifically shattered” but still standing; Turkish repair crews would now have the time-consuming task of dismantling the wreckage before they could start to rebuild.
That job complete, Lawrence rejoined the main Arab force as it fell upon the railway north of Deraa the following morning. Encountering little resistance, the thousand-odd warriors quickly took control of a nearly ten-mile stretch of track, enabling the demolition teams to begin placing their mines. The action had the effect of lifting Lawrence from the dark mood that had stalked him in Azraq; his primary orders from headquarters had been to isolate Deraa, and “I could hardly believe our fortune, hardly believe that our word to Allenby was fulfilled so simply and so soon.”
This left only the western spur leading into Palestine, and on that same afternoon of September 17, an Arab force stormed a railway station a few miles to the west of Deraa; in short order, they had ransacked the terminal and put to the torch all that couldn’t be carried off. But Lawrence had grander plans. Leading a small band farther west, he hoped to blow up the Yarmuk gorge bridges that had eluded his destruction a year before. Once again, though, he was to be thwarted, this time by the presence of a train filled with German and Turkish troops coming up from Palestine.
Still, as Lawrence turned back to rejoin the main rebel force the next day, he had every reason to feel pleased with the “work” that had been done: the main Turkish telegraph link to Palestine was now cut, all three railway spans sufficiently damaged that repair would take days, if not weeks. There was still more mayhem to be accomplished—on that same afternoon of September 18, he would see to the blowing up of another bridge, the seventy-ninth of his career—but the Azraq vanguard had achieved most every objective asked of it in prelude to Allenby’s offensive, now just hours away.
By prior arrangement, a Royal Flying Corps plane was scheduled to put into Azraq on the morning of September 21, bringing reports of how the offensive in Palestine was faring. Anxious for news, Lawrence raced back to the desert fortress the day before. Nearing a state of complete collapse—he’d barely slept since setting out from Azraq six days earlier—he found an empty cot in the encampment’s field hospital and fell into an exhausted slumber.
YALE’S FIRST CLUE came when he stepped into his assigned mess hall for dinner on September 18: the journalists were gone. The next clue was when he walked down to the motor pool compound: all the vehicles were gone, too. A junior British officer bravely explained that they had all been dispatched to various parts of the front in prelude to the coming offensive; apparently, none had been detailed for Yale or the one other military attaché remaining, an Italian major named de Sambouy.
“I was irritated and perplexed,” Yale wrote. “What should a military attaché do? Ought I to demand transportation to the front, or should I accept the lame excuse given us? Why shouldn’t Sambouy do something? He was a regular army officer who had been in the war since 1915. I went to bed annoyed with myself and the British.”
His sleep was to be interrupted. At 4:45 a.m. on the morning of September 19, Yale was wrenched awake by “a terrific roar that seemed to shake the whole world.” As one, nearly five hundred British artillery guns had commenced shelling the Turkish line all along the Palestinian front.
By the time he rose and dressed, Yale had resolved what to do. Striding into a general’s office, he announced that he was on his way to breakfast, and that if there wasn’t a car waiting for him when he emerged, he would send a cable to Washington announcing that he was being held captive by the British. His Italian counterpart was aghast at his temerity, but when the pair emerged from the mess hall a short time later, they found a Ford Model T awaiting them with a former London cabdriver at the wheel.
They made that morning for a bluff overlooking the Plain of Sharon, from which, they were told, they could view one section of the battlefield. Finding a group of British officers already ensconced in the ruins of an old Crusader castle, the two attachés joined them, training their binoculars on the action two or three miles to the north. It was Yale’s first experience observing combat, and he found it decidedly underwhelming. “Infrequent bursts of [artillery] shells [coming from] back of us on the plateau, white puffs of riflery on the hills in front of us, the intermittent rat-tat-tat of machine guns and, from time to time, lines of men who could scarcely be distinguished against the gray blankness of the limestone hills. It was nowhere near as thrilling as the sham battles I had watched as a boy at Van Cortland Park. For us, the day was long and monotonous. No one seemed to know what was happening; certainly, I had no idea of whether the British or the Turks were winning.”
New to war, the American attaché couldn’t appreciate that he was actually experiencing the very essence of the traditional battlefield, that amid the engulfing chaos even senior field commanders usually had only the vaguest sense of what was happening—and then often only on the ground directly before them. But the ever-resourceful Yale saw a means around this. Returning to General Headquarters that evening, he parlayed his attaché status into gaining admittance to the main telegraph room. There he discovered stacks of cables coming in from every corner of the front, dispatches that when plotted on a map gave him a grasp of the overall campaign available only to Allenby and his most senior advisors. This knowledge stood him in very good stead the following day when, having ventured to a new part of the front, Yale found himself briefing a British brigadier general on what was occurring elsewhere.
“This helped me to feel less awkward amongst the military,” he recalled, “and I even began to regain the confidence in myself which had been badly shaken when first I was thrown in among professional soldiers.”
For the first two days of the offensive, Yale had the luxury of observing war from a comfortable remove, the combatants appearing as so many scurrying ants in the distance. That ended on September 21, when he and his Model T companions journeyed up a mountain road leading to the town of Nablus in th
e Samaria foothills. The day before, a fleeing Turkish formation had made for Nablus up that same road, and there they had been found by the bombs and machine guns of swarming British warplanes.
“The Turks had no way of fighting back,” Yale recounted. “There was no shelter to run to, and no way of surrendering. The results were tragic.… For a few miles, the road was lined with bloated corpses, swelling to the bursting point under the hot rays of the sun.”
One image in particular stuck in Yale’s memory, a stretch of the road where an old Roman aqueduct crossed the valley. Here, scores of Turkish soldiers had hugged the stone walls of the aqueduct as protection against the strafing British warplanes—only to fall victim when the planes circled back to attack from the other direction. The dead men lay in a neat single-file line along the entire length of the aqueduct, looking “for all the world,” Yale would recall, “like a row of tin soldiers toppled over.”
THE NEWS WAS staggering. When the RFC plane touched down at Azraq on the morning of September 21, its pilot told of a British sweep up the Palestinian coast that had simply steamrolled whatever scant Turkish resistance stood in its path. A few weeks earlier, General Headquarters had talked of an advance that might take them as far as the city of Nablus, forty miles north of Jerusalem; now, in a matter of just two days, the British vanguard was already far above Nablus, and thousands of enemy soldiers had thrown down their weapons in surrender. The note of triumph was evident in the letter General Allenby had sent to Azraq for Faisal. “Already the Turkish Army in Syria has suffered a defeat from which it can scarcely recover,” it read. “It rests upon us now, by the redoubled energy of our [joint] attacks, to turn defeat into destruction.”
Lawrence in Arabia Page 65